Selling Starts with your Marketing

If you’ve ever seen the movie Tommy Boy with Chris Farley, you saw how much his character struggled to get his first sale. Selling is difficult. And the process of selling doesn’t begin with your sales team; it begins with your marketing.

What is the biggest and most frequent complaint the marketing department hears from anyone in the sales department? It’s always about the leads:

“These leads aren’t qualified”

“I need more leads”

“These leads are cold. They don’t even know us.”

The two most used solutions to this problem of getting more leads are cold calling and advertising.

I’m not against cold calling at all – in fact, I know some people who are incredibly good at it and set up tons of qualified appointments. I’m not against outbound advertising either. TV, Newspaper, Radio, Billboards and Print advertising all still work to some degree (although not as well as they used to).

Marketing is the KEY money maker in your business

Another solution to get more qualified leads is content marketing. Imagine one of your sales professionals meeting with a prospect that came to you. They had a pain or need, searched for a solution, and contacted you. You were at the right place, at the right time, with the right content. What do you think your close rates would be in that scenario?

The key is to consistently provide valuable content that your target market needs and is actively searching for. So when they seek out a solution to their problem, not only do they find you, but they see loads of valuable content that they can use. You then become the “thought leader” in their minds. You’ve taken that critical first step to gaining their trust.

Even if most of your business comes from referrals, your prospective customers are still going to check out your digital presence and formulate their own opinion.

How to Use Content Marketing to set up your sales team for success

You need a strategy and a system in place to get results. The key is for your content marketing to give your prospects value and really take care of them.

In a previous blog, I put together a 5-step system that will help you get started with your content marketing strategy (or re-ignite your sales strategy). If you take action and properly use content marketing, your sales will go up and complaints from the sales team will go down. Guaranteed!

I hope this information helps you grow your business. If not, at least you got a few good Tommy Boy quotes.